Saturday, February 21, 2015

Surly Temple's Minor Misery.

I'm a college adjunct but mainly a high school history teacher at a fancy-pants private school. The school is a very nice place full of bright and earnest kids and pretty great adults who are well-meaning even when I don't agree with them. Right now, my disagreement is with the college counseling office, which aggressively pushes the adoption of Advanced Placement (AP) classes wherever they can cram them into our curriculum. I hate teaching the history AP; it's an insane amount of content that forces the class to move so fast that it becomes a superficial drill-and-kill nightmare. It's nothing like a college survey course. Sure, it's "challenging", but in the most shallow, counterproductive, intellectually-abusive way.My department has been told that there's a slim chance that if we make a good case and offer acceptable alternatives, we may be able to eliminate APs. So I have two questions for CMers, especially in the humanities.

1. I know that college admissions staff look at APs on applicants' transcripts, but how do professors feel about them? Do you find students with AP credit in your fields to be well-prepared? Are AP courses in the humanities truly "college level"? Really any feedback you have would be helpful.

2. Can you point me toward any resources on humanities APs, either pro or con, that don't focus on college admissions, but rather the quality of the course? I'm having a helluva time researching this issue, because I can't ask anyone in the AP community or at my school without outing myself as, at best, an "attitude problem." Also, most people who are involved with the program are pretty serious ETS Kool-Aid drinkers. I can find journalistic content easily, but actual scholarship has been harder to come by. Plus, I love CM and always enjoy the misery and the comments, and I trust this group to give me some thoughtful, straight-shooting, miserable goodness.

Thank you very, very much.

Surly

19 comments:

Not in humanities but your question hit a nerve with me. AP chemistry is not real gen chem. My uni's freshman chemistry is average but not spectacularly hard. we tell chem majors that they should not skkp freshman chem after passing the AP exam. they don't learn enough from the AP chem class in order to succeed in the sophomore level classes.

Historian here. We grudgingly allow two AP classes to count towards our major, but we'd rather not. They have to score a 4 or 5 on the examination. But that is long established prejudice rather than empirically demonstrated fact. Which is to say we don't think that AP prepares a student especially well for the type of work we ask at college, but we've never tested the premise.

You should test that premise next year. Take all AP students, hand them a research essay assignment similar to what you would expect from a History 101 student at the end of the course. See what happens. Then abandon your AP relationship.

Grudgingly is right, along with the "dual enrollment" HS courses for college credit our legislature has saddled us with.

Ideally, our intro courses are more substantial, skill-wise, but we've never tested it, either, nor spent enough time defining what we and our adjuncts should be trying to accomplish to actually know what we're looking for.

I'm in English and I used to be an AP exam reader, and I'm fairly satisfied that the essay section tests the skills I want my students to have. I can't speak to the multiple-choice section, since I haven't seen any of the questions since I was an AP student myself, but the essay portion is really a pretty decent test of close reading, analysis, and writing, given the constraints of a two-hour time frame. (What it doesn't do is require students to show familiarity with a particular set of texts, or with overall historical currents, but I figure that as long as they know how to read, I care a lot less about what they've read.)

Oh, and my AP history course was terrific -- I remember writing a ten-page research paper about the McCarthy era with bonus analysis of Herblock cartoons -- but I'm willing to believe that it might have been my teacher who was excellent, rather than the AP program in general.

I recently had high-school students in my multivariable calculus (sophomore-level) class, who apparently had exhausted the AP offerings at their (STEM-magnet type) school. They were among the best students in the class, and probably went on to more challenging places than we are (at least I hope so.)

On the other hand, our intro-level math classes (for STEM majors) are shallow. You don't really see what math is (as we, the people developing it, understand it) unless you take an honors course. And, for those, the best preparation would be not survey-type AP calculus, but one year of rigorous set theory, logic and some Calculus, but with all the proofs. I had that in my high school, but I've never seen it done elsewhere.

This makes me sad, since, like Porpentine, I had a really good experience in AP US history. But I attended a private school with small classes and excellent teachers, and I strongly suspect that the test has changed since then, since we spent a lot of our in-class time on skills (e.g. practice DBQs) rather than drilling content/coverage. I did spend some time reviewing/cramming content with the help of a review book in the days immediately before the exam (which I'm pretty sure was something the teacher recommended, and something for which the school allowed time -- my school was also unusual in that we got to stay home and study for a few days before the exam, something which genuinely mirrored my college experience, but would probably raise all sorts of questions at most schools, quite possibly including my alma mater, these days).

I'm an English teacher, so I can't comment directly on the equivalence of the history exam to college courses. As a junior-level writing-in-the-disciplines teacher, I have the sense that IB classes are pretty good preparation for (but not necessarily substitutes for) college-level work; I don't have a clear sense about APs.

The DBQs drive me crazy. I'm sure that any student, if given a hand-wrapped series of primary and secondary sources, could do something with humanities work. But college is about research. DBQs (document-based questions, for the uninitiated, which are a college of sources) make students think that teachers are supposed to give all the research to them. It infantalizes the students and contributes to this atmosphere that they should expect teachers to provide. A stronger high school program will teach students how to research responsibly and do real research with primary, scholarly, and general information sources.

If I get one more kid telling me that I should accept their essay because it was worth a 5 on the AP (and it is absolute TRIPE), I just might push that kid out of a window and into the snow. AP trains students to be worse adults.

I actually feel that DBQs served me well, because they taught me what a collection of primary and secondary sources should look like, and taught me that I should base my arguments on the analysis of primary sources, period.

The result was that, when assigned a research paper freshman year, I headed into the library and found sources in the bound volumes of 19th-century periodicals available in my college's (very large, very historic) library. The bound pages even had the stamps showing that they had originally served as leisure reading for 19th-century students, which I thought was incredibly cool (why yes, I'm a nerd).

But I admit that I wasn't a typical student. I hadn't thought about the expect-the-teacher-to-hand-out-the-sources problem. I mostly spend my time fuming about students who don't realize that finding even reliable,scholarly secondary sources doesn't constitute original scholarly research (and, conversely, that scholars consider reading each others' work only the very first step in doing what they call "research"). In other words, I'm inclined to declare war on the secondary-source-based argumentative research paper rather than the DBQ.

There's probably truth in both of our objections; to each her own battles.

At my graduate school and the two unis I adjuncted at before landing full-time professor work, there was an unwritten tradition of forcing AP students to take an extra history class because AP did so much crap to students that they were even worse prepared than those who did not take AP. They didn't just join the 100 level intro classes; we gave them a "200" level class that was a remedial work to un-learn the AP crap and THEN gave them a second 200 level class that was essentially the first 100 level class. So far from getting an extra college credit, we made them take extra college classes. This was at two schools, one state, one private. At the third school, the AP tests were ignored when placing them in actual, real college courses.

AP courses are the bastian of mediocre schools. Very good schools do not rely on AP classes. Look at the University of Chicago Lab Schools, who have said a great deal about the worthlessness of AP and instead use a system of Advanced Track crafted by highly trained teachers. Urban School in San Fran (one of those cutting edge very fancy schools serving the needs of Facebook and other tech kids) have written a lot about why they are not using AP. The Proof school (opening next year in Cali) are spending a whole year writing curriculum so they can proudly advertise that they don't have to rely on the BS AP coursework: theirs is better. Berekely Carol in Brooklyn makes a point of avoiding AP in order to be more competitive. Any parent can find a mediocre school with bad teachers who hide behind the AP curriculum. A truly elite school builds their own complex curriculum using research, training, and gut instincts.

Schools that offer AP say this to their parents: we aren't sure what upper level education should look like, so we join the AP band wagon. We are mediocre. We do not know how to teach your kids. We aren't sure what to do.

There is a very strong argument to be made that in order to be truly elite, you must create your own curriculum. I hope you are successful in abandoning the AP bull shit.

I don't recall Urban having a great emphasis on tech, but you're right that by avoiding the AP trap they have time for electives like neurobiology, marine biology, statistics, Russian literature, intaglio printmaking, etc., all of which is better.

Thank you, AM; you echo many of my feelings about AP and the College Board, and I appreciate your mention of those specific schools. I've long argued that our department should be allowed to design our own curricula, which would be far superior to AP. We are an excellent school that suffers from a bizarre lack of confidence. That we continue to hitch our wagon to this crazy-train of financial and scholarly corruption and abuse is baffling.

Oh, the candy! I forgot about that. Never before or since have I seen so many bowls of gummy bears.

Sounds like you had a similar experimence, sans beer. I was much younger then, so I could drink until 1 am then get up without a hangover. The professional relationships that I made there lasted for several weeks. We had a good time but I will never ever do it again now that I have a family.

Yeah, I had a great group of friends that I'd see year after year at the reading, and that part was a joy. A booze-soaked, hilarious joy. But one of the worst parts of the week was most of the other readers. Jeebus, what a bunch of credulous ETS sycophants. They would hyperventilate about how "wonderful" the AP program was even as our table leader was telling us that we needed to "bump some of these grades down into a lower range, because the stats people are telling us the grades are too high." (Not the people with the actual essays and grading rubrics, mind you: the stats people who were determining the relative weight of the different parts of the test).

What Was This?

College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.